A new report claims that Apple has recently gone on a hiring spree for a new team that will be based in Boston. This team is reportedly tasked with improving the company’s virtual personal assistant called Siri.

It is said that Apple has hired a team of people that are experts in the field of speech recognition technology. Team members are believed to have previously worked for VoiceSignal Technologies, a company that Nuance purchased by in 2007 for $293 million. Siri currently uses Nuance’s voice recognition technology to function. Does the hiring spree mean that Apple is working on its own proprietary voice recognition technology that will rid it of its dependence on Nuance?

That is not an impossible prospect, particularly when we consider the fact that Nuance’s voice recognition technology is also used by Apple’s competitors, Samsung and Google in particular. Both companies have their own Siri rivals, Apple having its own technology would mean that it wouldn’t have to share it with any of its rivals. If that is indeed the case, it is likely that the company’s technology will be patented. There’s always a watchful eye on Apple patents, so if anything like this does happen, it will definitely be brought in to the limelight.

Apple debuted Siri back in 2011. Since then it has continued to roll out improvements, such as support for more languages. The personal assistant is now also available on iPod touch as well as the iPad, its an integral part of current and most certainly of the future Apple devices. So it wouldn’t come as a surprise to see the company make more of an effort to improve Siri.